Teo
Insight Teo was born to an unmarried Mexican migrant worker, who lied to him about his father's race as well as telling him his father was dead. Over the years, she returned to the faith of her parents and became devoutly Catholic. She raised Teo by herself until the age of 16, when he was caught naked with the foreman's son. She was furious and humiliated, having harbored secret hopes that the foreman would find her attractive, and threw Teo out. He made his way to his grandfather's home. His grandfather was more or less kind, but largely indifferent to Teo and his emotional conflicts. One evening, in vino veritas, Abuelo told Teo the truth about his father, and the similarities between his life and his mother's. Grandfather had thrown her out at a similar age when she became pregnant, not only out of wedlock, but by a Native American who refused to leave his tribal spirituality and become Catholic. Abuelo also revealed that Teo's father was still living on "a reservation in New Mexico or Arizona or some other Southwest place." Teo left shortly afterwards, searching for his father and eventually found him. His father welcomed him, though he had had no idea of Teo's existence. Teo was welcomed as Two-Spirit on the reservation, which was for the most part Navajo. After about five years, Teo's father, Niyol ("wind" in Navajo) began instructing Teo in Navajo spirituality, including peyote. On one of his many peyote quests, Teo met a raven and began a deeper spiritual journey with Raveneye as his guide. Teo finds he can join his mind with Raveneye's and fly with him, experiencing life from a raven's point of view. Before the deeper meanings of this could be explored with guidance from Niyol, Teo's father was killed in a barroom brawl. Teo withdrew into the desert more and more frequently for longer and longer periods of time, often being gone for days on end. He returned to Niyol's mother's house on the reservation, to sit and stare at nothing, smoking weed, until she told him the free ride was over and he would have to start bringing in money to support himself. To that end, she had scrimped and saved enough to send him to a nearby community college. He saw this as an opportunity for freedom to do more drugs, but his grandmother held the purse-strings tightly and forced him to choose: settle down and study or hit the streets and do odd jobs for drug money the rest of his life. Teo chose wisely and once he found his calling, massage therapy, he worked hard, traveling back to the reservation frequently to visit his grandmother and Raveneye. When he graduated, he found a job at Aguajero Azul, a gay resort in the Arizona desert. He soon established himself as a hard worker, who considered the spiritual aspects of massage to be the most important part of his job and calling. Sex is never part of his therapy, though on occasion he will agree to meet a guest after hours. For the most part, he is celibate, because he will not damage the healing his massage and spiritual awareness bring to his clients by letting sex interfere. He lives, as do all the staff, on the grounds in a small cottage, taking time off when possible to continue his peyote quests.